Measurement-Aware Monitor Placement and Routing: A Joint Optimization Approach for Network-Wide Measurements

Network-wide traffic measurement is important for various network management tasks, ranging from traffic accounting, traffic engineering, network troubleshooting to security. Previous research in this area has focused on either deriving better monitor placement strategies for fixed routing, or strategically routing traffic sub-populations over existing deployed monitors to maximize the measurement gain. However, neither of them alone suffices in real scenarios, since not only the number of deployed monitors is limited, but also the traffic characteristics and measurement objectives are constantly changing. This paper presents an MMPR (Measurement-aware Monitor Placement and Routing) framework that jointly optimizes monitor placement and dynamic routing strategy to achieve maximum measurement utility. The main challenge in solving MMPR is to decouple the relevant decision variables and adhere to the intra-domain traffic engineering constraints. We formulate it as an MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) problem and propose several heuristic algorithms to approximate the optimal solution and reduce the computation complexity. Through experiments using real traces and topologies (Abilene , AS6461 , and GEANT ), we show that our heuristic solutions can achieve measurement gains that are quite close to the optimal solutions, while reducing the computation times by a factor of 23X in Abilene (small), 246X in AS6461 (medium), and 233X in GEANT (large), respectively.